At 4/30/99 03:00 PM , Max Slover wrote:
>We have a need to create a 9 track tape for a client and seemed to be
>stumped on it's creation. If someone could clue me into the proper way of
>doing this I would be so grateful (as would a few other folks)
>
>What we need on this tape is...
>
>6250
>8000 blocks
>80 fixed record length
>non labeled
>ebcidic
>
>And we need to put 3 seperate files on this tape.

The 6250 is easy if you have a 6250 capable tape drive (7980, 7978 or 7976) as
that's the default.

I gather "8000 blocks" indicates the block size in bytes, not the number of
blocks.  On MPE the record size and number of blocks can be specified via the
FILE command.  In this case it looks like 100 80 byte records per block.

Assuming device class TAPE and the input files are FILE1, FILE2 and FILE3 and
contain only ASCII which needs translating to EBCDIC (Note this will also
translate any binary data which might be in the file and thus may not be what
you want.  If the entire record isn't supposed to be translated, something more
complex will have to do the translation.):

:file mytape;dev=TAPE;rec=-80,100,f
:fcopy
>from=FILE1;to=*mytape;ebcdicout
>from=FILE2;to=*;ebcdicout
>from=FILE3;to=*;ebcdicout
>exit

I'm pretty paranoid about tape errors, so I generally add ";verify" to the end
of each fcopy command writing to tape so fcopy will rewind the tape and re-read
the data back and check it against the original data.  However, I don't recall
doing that with ";ebcdicout" so I'm not 100% certain that combination works,
but I would expect it to.

P.S.  What Wirt said about the FCOPY manual being worth knowing is very true.
FCOPY and the FILE command combine to make a pretty powerful yet very simple to
use file and tape copying tool.
--
Jeff Woods
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